Maya: Water Along a Curve [Bifröst]

hello Maya comes with a tiny program called F check which you see working now it's currently caching 200 frames I rendered in a pretty low resolution just recently and what you can see is water with nice reflections and transmissions and the water flows sort of along a curve while it flows along the curve it goes down now it goes up again so it's a swinging motion sort sort of and it has nice splashes there are two lights in the scene one comes from the left it's an area light which you can see working on the right wall and there's a surrounding light an Arnold SkyDome light where I mapped an HDR image to the curve is visible which is quite unusual because NURBS curves are infinitely small but you can render them of course but how can you make that water flow along that curve and that's the question I'm gonna answer now and you have to go from there in order to get a nice rendering and everything else which looks more sophisticated okay here is a new scene we need a curve of course so let's go to the front window and use the tab curves surfaces here and this tool in order to draw a curve like this whoops do up slopes so this is the curve now we need to think about how we can make this sort of emit along its path and there's a standard trick you use in computer animation very often it's uh you create an object which you make invisible later and in this case I'll choose but just a simple cube and I'll scale it a little bit in this direction and flatter like this so this is gonna be my emitter but before I make it emit water I'm gonna attach it to that curve so it flows down that curve that's easily done if you know how to do it it's always critical what to select first and last of course you can make this curve follow the cube for example so it would just sit there because the cube is not animated but this is a motion path we're using now and you always pick the slave first and the master last and the slave is the object which is supposed to follow or to be constrained to something and the curve is the master who dictates where this cube should go so you select this and shift select the curve and now you need to go to animation and here you have the constraints and the motion paths and attach to motion path when you invoke this command it will create an animation which is exactly the frame range of your time slider pillow which is currently set to 120 so you can of course changes now or later with the option box or later I just leave it there so I have an animation which goes from frame 1 to 120 and which will move our box down that path and in the next step I want to make this box emit bottom easy animation FX we need special effects now and here we have the Pyro's fluids and with this object selected we create a liquid that means we make this a liquid emitter and now you see something blue falling down in that green box that's the emitted water and it just ignores the motion of our object here let's select the Bifrost liquid here and here we have particles and we could make the particles bigger like this but instead we want to see the voxels that's a volume pixel so to say and we can disable particles so we have this kind of object here which will look in more interesting when we start the simulation again so it's more like a like a volume which we see now the second thing we need to consider is that it just falls down according to gravity and it ignores that motion and it ignores the motion because it's finished here it just is being created and it falls down that's all we need a continuous emission and in order to do this to invoke this we need to pick the emitter and this object is the emitter so here we have emitter properties let's click on that tab and here we have the continuous emission let's click here and now the animation goes quite differently because the water is following the Q because the cube is emitting particles all the time what they still do is fall to the ground and that's not what you saw in the animation I showed you at the very beginning and that's the thing of the dynamic system here we need to reduce the gravity so let's see where we find it it's right here under Bifrost liquid properties container 1 it's property of the container of the water not of the emitter not of the cube so the gravity is currently set to 9.8 and in a direction of minus one in Y meaning down so if you reduce this to one you have a much less gravitation so the water won't fall down that fast but it will still fall down a little bit if you pleased with this just leave it there if not you can animate this value here for example you can set the gravity to minus 10 that means with this value here a negative value it will go up into the air what I did in the animation you saw at the very beginning was I used an expression here I typed in equals actually I can do this now equals sign of time time in parentheses so press Enter now I have a value for the magnitude which swings between minus 1 and 1 it actually does swing so it's a very miniature gravity up and down and it's swinging very slowly because per second but it makes the water splashes a little bit more interesting and it will never really fall down because once it starts falling down it will be drawn up again like here now so this looks already quite interesting now let's hide the cue we don't need to see it we of course we need it in the scene press H so it's hidden now and now I can render it but I need a light of course and well we can create a sky dome light and as I said before I did several tutorials about this map the color - an HDR file like this goes very fast now I know and now when you render it you see the HDR file working the background and the water splash right in here we can make the visibility zero of the but still the effect 100% so I reduce a camera visibility to zero so the the the bridge won't be visible anymore but you see all the reflections work here and and transparency etc so this is quite an interesting thing now now we want a little bit more splashes and that's a crucial value really form for all kinds of water simulations so let's pick the Bifrost liquid container again and right here where we visited the gravity is the master box of size it's by default set to 0.5 if we increase this to 1 we have a much more crude and rough animation which goes much faster let's go to frame 51 further a little bit closer here and render it so these kind of two blobs we see now now instead of the master boxercise 1.0 let's go to 0.1 which is a very high resolution it's tenfold more res resolution now and Maya takes a lot more time to evaluate this we are currently simulating frame 21 22 so it takes a while but you see already that the water is developing much more vividly let's wait until frame 50 you reduce the master voxel size at the very end just before rendering maybe 0.3 will suit your purpose and it will work much faster the only thing we'll do after this is make the curve visible and that's something which has to do with Arnold it's a speciality of Arnold frame 46 47 50 so that's the same frame as before and now we render it and that's quite a different object very complex and of course when you render the whole sequence it's very very vivid as you've seen before I want to first of all make the lights invisible so we see we are not distracted by the lights we have to select the curve and now we go to the auto setting and here is render curve so the curve is being rendered now and you have a curve shader you can give it another color for example and the size of the of the curve can be increased here it's pretty small now but it's it's visible already I don't know if it's visible with a black background no it isn't so we need maybe a white background here and now we render it again and you see the curve in the rendering now well you need to find your own way from here and enjoy the water bye bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: Uhr

Views: 15,918

Rating: 4.8641977 out of 5

Keywords: Water, Computer Animation, Tutorial, 3D Tutorial, Autodesk, Liquids, Simulation, 3D Animation, Dynamics, Maya, Maya Tutorial, Bifrost, Maya 2018, Viscosity, Arnold Physical Sky, Arnold Rendering, Maximilian Schönherr

Id: IcDJMLjSowI

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 27 2018